NextGen suffers from an inability to clearly and simply articulate what it will do for everyday Americans. Recent media coverage seems to focus on the price tag of NextGen and an unclear picture of its benefits. The problem of explaining what NextGen will do is exacerbated by the fact that the nation’s air transportation system is quite complex. The operational processes and technologies are particularly complex. The community is large, so any one particular viewpoint tends to be limited, like looking at a house through just one of its windows.

As I’ve said before, the benefits story is one that needs to be developed and boiled down into a form suitable for USA Today. This is one attempt to begin that process, trying to answer the question: Why should Joe Shmoe care about NextGen?

The nation’s air transportation system is subject to the fundamental forces of supply and demand. While I’ll mainly talk about supply and demand, and capacity and efficiency, we should note that there is more to NextGen than just capacity and efficiency; there’s safety, security, and the environment too. But, let’s save those for another time.

The demand for air transportation grows with the Gross Domestic Product. Generally speaking, as the economy grows, demand grows. While we’ve had an economic downturn of substantial proportions since 2008, we have seen increasing signs of a recovery and resumption of GDP growth. So, it’s only a matter of time before air transportation demand returns and resumes its steady, long term growth.

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

When it comes to capacity, we can look at the interplay between demand levels and delays. What we see is that delays are quite closely correlated to demand. As demand rises or falls, so do delays. The problem here is that delays swing quite dramatically with small changes in demand. This is a sign of a system that is approaching the limits of its capacity. If you’re interested in reading a lot more about delays, the NEXTOR Total Delay Impact Study, published in October 2010, is the best available and most comprehensive study of air transportation delay impacts and costs. It concluded, for instance, that the total cost of delays was $32.9B in 2007 alone. Some of these delays were unavoidable. But, this estimate provides a sense of the scale of one of the big problems NextGen is striving to solve.

The recent economic downturn has caused demand to fall off. So, delays are down for the moment. But, as the economy recovers and demand grows to entirely new heights, we can expect that delays will increase much faster than demand. That total cost of delay of $32.9B in one year will be a much bigger number when the economy recovers.

Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics

Why are delays so important? The conventional thinking has been that delays are costly. Delays cause more fuel to be burned, crews have to work longer, and passengers incur more cost because of the cost of their lost time. But, especially as we approach the limits of a system’s capacity, there are even more dire consequences. Delays introduce a significant layer of uncertainty. Schedules become far less predictable. Airlines typically operate each aircraft on a series of sequential flights each day. They are striving to operate each flight according to a published schedule. But, delays cause everything downstream to be disrupted, not just the flights and passengers, but gates, ground crews, and other scheduled and constrained resources, like airspace and runways. Striving to minimize the disruptions potentially adds even more uncertainties. Safety rules limit the total work hours and require prescribed amounts of rest for flight crews, so matching crews to all of these planned flights is a real challenge. Aircraft require prescribed inspections and maintenance actions, which are not readily available at each location. So, ensuring that each aircraft is at an appropriate location for inspections and maintenance is another major challenge. When disruptions and uncertainties are introduced by delays, you reach a point where you can no longer plan and execute effectively. Things begin to unravel. Airlines are not able to make a profit unless they can plan and execute. They have no choice, but to throttle back. They add more time to the published trip times to reduce the effects of delay uncertainties (ever wonder why you often arrive much earlier than planned?). They de-peak hub and spoke operations to reduce the total hourly load on an airport. They increase the connection times between flights, so fewer people miss planned connections. The net effect of all of these kinds of adjustments is lower overall capacity and efficiency of the system. The system is less capable of moving as many people from point A to point B each day.

Reaching the limits of system capacity effectively means that we run out of supply while demand continues to grow. When there is huge demand in the face of limited supply, prices go up – often a lot. They go up until supply and demand again reach equilibrium. How about a $10,000 economy class ticket to get from NY to LAX? In the past, when prices went up, new airlines would form to increase supply and compete on price. But, in the future, with capacity reaching its limits, there will be far less room for new entrants. A few will emerge and fill in wherever available capacity can be found, but soon all of the capacity will be consumed. We can expect other kinds of changes as well. Larger aircraft. Lower frequency of service between cities. Less service or no service to smaller cities and communities. Less access by air will result in less regional economic growth, leading to fewer jobs and economic decline. People will use other viable modes of transportation when feasible. They will drive longer distances to catch a flight, and they’ll pay a whole lot more.

NextGen is about creating a lot more capacity and getting much more use out of existing and new capacity. It’s about battling the shortage on the supply side of the equation. Increasing supply will allow a greater part of the demand to be served. With fewer shortages, the system will become more predictable. The airlines should have an easier time planning and executing their plans, which in turn should allow them to be more profitable. Travelers should see NextGen benefits in terms of service quality and prices. Service quality will come from more predictable and on-time performance, less delay, higher frequency of flights between cities, more destinations to choose from and shorter connection waiting times. It will also come from competition, because there will be more room for competition (maybe one day we’ll actually look forward to flying again). Greater overall supply as well as competition will keep the lid on prices, so travelers will continue to be able to afford to fly.

Clearly the air transportation system is far more complex than this. But, perhaps we’ve allowed this complexity to stand in the way of communicating in an effective way with the broader public. Straight talk is vital to preserving the fragile support for NextGen and transforming it into more robust support. That support can only come when people make a clear connection to what NextGen will do for each of us.